foreverknightfandomcom-20200216-history
User talk:Kodia/Archive 1
New wiki Hi Kodia -- we are excited to have Forever Knight Wiki as part of the Wikia community! Starting a new wiki can be overwhelming, but don't worry, the Wikia Community Team is here to help! We have put together a few guides to getting started. They say imitation is the best form of flattery so absolutely check out other wikis on Wikia for ideas on layout, ways to organize your content, etc. We are all one big family at Wikia and the most important thing is to have fun! * Our guide to Getting Started gives you 5 things you can do right now to set your wiki up for success * We also put together some Advice On Starting a Wiki which provides a more a in-depth look at some of the important things you should consider when building a wiki * If you are new to wikis in general than we recommend checking our new user FAQ If you need help (which trust me we ALL do) you can access our full in-depth help at Help Wikia, or email us through our . Also, you can visit our live #wikia chat channel any time. A lot of the veteran "Wikians" hang out here so its a good place if come if you want to get some advice or simply make friends. Now, go edit! We look forward to seeing this project thrive! Best wishes, Catherine Munro Welcome Hi, this is a cool idea for a wiki. I like what you've done so far. I work on a lot of Entertainment wikis, so let me know if you need any help. One suggestion I could offer would be to create a set of welcome templates. These are messages left for new contributors to your wiki to introduce them to the community and show them where they can find help. If you'd like to see examples, you're welcome to copy this template for anonymous contributors, and this one for those who have logged in. If you have any questions, please leave a message on my talk page. —Scott (talk) 19:49, 2 January 2008 (UTC) Hello Hey, I watched Forever Knight a long time ago back when it first aired, or at least when it first re-aired, can't really remember as it was a long long time ago. I managed to get a hold of a copy of the first two series and started rewatching them, forgot just how much fun it was, even if it was so much 80s cheese. I noticed that Torri Higginson played Erica and when I went online to find out if that really was her I found this place. I noticed that it was a bit bare in places, so I thought I'd lend a hand. Not sure how much I will be able to do, but happy to help. Cheers, --JayCee 13:58, 17 June 2008 (UTC) :Welcome welcome welcome! Any help would be appreciated. I too watched it originally, went to the conventions, did the fanfic thing. And developed the First Unofficial FK Home page, I think. I thought the wiki was a much better way to keep the information alive than a very labor intensive website, so...the more the merrier! Let me know if you have any questions and I'll see what I can do to help. And for those things I'm not sure about, we have a great set of people to help us in the wikia staff and helpers program. Welcome aboard!--Kodia 14:08, 17 June 2008 (UTC) Thank you for souch a warm welcome! Thank you ever so much for the warm welcome! We'll try not to get up to too much mischief while you're gone. Have a lovely vacation and thanjks again for the opportunity! Susanmgarrett 04:55, 26 July 2008 (UTC)Susan M. Garrett Too much mischief...? "We'll try not to get up to too much mischief while you're gone." :: — Well, that depends on your definition of "mischief", doesn't it? As you know, before you left I was uploading images. Before that, I was doing pages for each of the episodes in Season Three. Given what I've been doing the last couple of days, I figure I'd better leave notes as I go. The changes you made to my Season 3 stuff: sure, some of that I like fine. You have your ideas on layout; and a lot of it I like too. I'm not 100% convinced I like the boxes—or at least not so much in their current version. First, the picture seems always to come out a predetermined width, which would be find if it weren't for two things: * I'm not always linking in pictures that are the same size. What one wants is to get the same sort of "weight" to the image (which more or less means total area). Fixing the width means that broad pictures are squidged down to fit, while long pictures—being shown the same width, wind up very far down the page. One solution, I suppose, would be to choose only full screenshots, rather than cropping them. The trouble with that is that I don't always want to do that. Call me aesthetic, but I want to pick the best picture! And, in deciding "best", I'm often trying to get to optimize the balance of shapes. Or crop out the edges in order to (effectively) enlarge the interesting bits. * The predetermined width, as my browser shows it, is rather small. I want a bigger picture, and I'm not sure how to do it as the box template is set up. This I'm going to try playing with a bit. Second, the colour scheme for the FK wiki is not fixed, so what one is seeing is the default—at least unless one sets one's own preferences. Playing around a bit, I changed my setting to "Slate", which gives a dark grey background around the white areas, and yellow bands at the top. There's a bit about wiki administrators (i.e. you, I think) being able to customize—said in reference to allowing them to override your preferences so you get the wiki in optimal appearance. Maybe something can be done about this when you return. At any rate, if one hasn't set one's own preferences, the FK wiki simply shows the default: a white background with blue lines. And what has that to do with vampires? Which is relevant to boxes in this way: whichever setting, the top of the box shows a sort of pinky-red colour. Aesthetics again, I know. But it's not exactly a coherent look to the site. Anyway, boxes.... There will be more on boxes. I've just been glancing at the Character pages, and the boxes there.... Greer Watson 02:32, 31 July 2008 (UTC) :In reverse order, as I understand it, the only overriding that I can do as an administrator is to change the default appearance of the wiki for *unregistered* users. Those users who are registered will see the wiki using whatever settings that they specifically choose, not what I set. So I can certainly change the default look but not what *everyone* sees all the time. Now, that having been said, I will doublecheck this to be sure. At present, I left the default that was assigned when the wiki was created. I did it specifically because of some information that Wikia had given us regarding the updates they were implementing (especially regarding advertisements within the wikis). Rather than go to a great deal of effort specifying a look for the entire wiki, I left it alone until they were done (and because most entertainment/tv wikis start with the general look you see anyway, so it would be easy to get help from wikia janitors if something went seriously wrong). I'll start playing around with the look a little more after I confirm that there aren't any big changes coming any more (I can only think of one, but that might have been delayed or canceled). :Linking to the boxes can be updated and I've read your later comments on this which we'll have to address. This is one thing that I think we'll end up disagreeing on. However, the pictures I may be able to do something about with regard to the boxes. I'll have to brush up on my wiki code markup though to see if I can do it effectively (I'm decidedly not a programmer) and it may take me a little bit to get something working that would help fix what you're seeing regarding the images and their set size.--Kodia 14:27, 10 August 2008 (UTC) ::My reading of the instructions on appearance is that the sysop can lock the appearance of the wiki. Although the registered owner can choose to override this, they are told that it is recommended not to do so. ::Assuming that they follow the recommendation, they will then see their chosen setting instead of the default on most sites. But they will see the sysop's custom skin on any site where it has been locked. ::I think there's more on this in a section that's open only to sysops. — Greer Watson 05:42, 11 August 2008 (UTC) Updating you Looking back over what I just wrote, I realize that I got "boxed" in! So much for telling you what I've been doing. Okay. The Season 3 episode pages meant I had to upload some pictures so that I could illustrate them. That led to the decision to upload more pictures so I could illustrate as I went. I did that for a while. (A looooooong while.) Then I went over to the Fan Fiction section, which you have organized by genre. (Very sensible.) I added a category for Virtual Seasons, with two subcategories for the two that I know of: V4S and FK4. For the former, I simply ported over the description from Fan History. By rights, ultimately, each of the episodes/stories ought to have its own page—but I was never involved in V4S, so I'm leaving that to others. FK4 being "mine own poor thing", I did rather more. Each of the 22 episodes now has its own page under the category, I ported in the Fan History text, and most pages have pictures. I probably will go back and do more later; but that's it for now. I've brisked round the Factions category. Susan (I think) did a nice history for FH; so I put that on your Factions page—with the links tweaked, of course. I added a few more factions pages; and I found pictures to illustrate all of them. Which meant uploading more pictures, of course. So I did that. And did more. And then more. And some more.... I've reorganized the whole Forever Knight Images category. I have not relabelled all the images that you uploaded. You've put them hither and yon; but I think a coherent Images section is what is needed, given the fact that people may want to hunt out a picture to illustrate a page they're doing—and need a central place to go looking. We probably need to have some pointer in the Help section about that—something about, "If you don't have a specific picture you want to upload, here's a place to look and see what's already here." Today, I was looking at the Characters section. It's obvious that you've done a lot of work on the vampire characters. I have pictures for some of them; so, at some point, I'll have to go and put them in. However, I'll need to hunt out, crop, and upload pictures of the others. (I have this advantage in that, having helped NAT a bit with her revised Episode Archives, I have it all on my computer, which is easy for browsing.) As far as the Characters section is concerned, I've tried to rationalize the categorization of the individual pages. Clearly, after doing a few, you decided not to put all the pages under "Characters" but put them in the "Known Vampires" subcategory. However, there are plenty of other possible ways to categorize the pages. Which I've done (or at least started). Nick, for example, is not only a Known Vampire and one of LaCroix's Vampires, he is also a Main Character and a Police Officer. However, I have yet to do the rest of the actual individual pages—for the Human Characters, particularly. Can't do it all at once, much though I'd like to. I have yet to go back and make the Episodes pages for Seasons 1 & 2, for example. Greer Watson 02:57, 31 July 2008 (UTC) :Okay, this looks good. Categorization is part of the bread and butter, if you will, for wiki pages. I would prefer not to have any empty categories but I understand this may be unavoidable in some instances as the wiki begins its life. There is one thing I believe we must insist on for categories, however. Categories are meant to be alphabetical lists of information. Period. Including long chunks of information (especially those with headings) like in articles quite simply belongs in a main article, not in the categorical pages. Categories should provide a brief introduction to the topic and a link to more information if it's available, but there should never be enough information before the categorical listing such that a user has to scroll to reach it, even on a small monitor. The fan factions category is a perfect example of this done well so far on the wiki. There are a few instances of this not done so well that we'll have to clean up. Some of the ones that aren't correct yet would benefit from being placed in a main article with a stub tag encouraging readers to add to the information (though admittedly, it's you and me making edits right now). :Everything looks good so far with what you've done, so I'll close this out and try to move on to the other things you've noted and see what I can do to comment. One thing before that, though...if you see me trailing through and tweaking things, please understand it's this obsessive compulsive 20 years of technical writing that makes me do it. It should never be interpreted as me thinking you've done something wrong. I just can't help myself. I edit and write. It's in my blood.--Kodia 14:17, 10 August 2008 (UTC) The episode template I've changed the template slightly, so that the box at the top is now 20px wider (and so is the picture). That makes the image 220px wide, which looks better. Well, in my opinion, anyway! For the sake of uniformity, I'm going to use uncropped screenshots—mostly; and, if not, then pictures that are very close in proportional dimension. This is going to mean choosing different images in some instances; but I can try to work the other one in somewhere down the page. I haven't altered the colour of the bands for the title and navigation headings on the boxes. Since you picked a very specific shade (or was it a default choice?)—anyway, it may well have been deliberate. So I'll wait till you get back to discuss colour coordinating throughout the wiki. Greer Watson 06:11, 31 July 2008 (UTC) :The colors were deliberately chosen. What colors would you like to see? Red was chosen for vampires, green for humans. The rest I think I just chose in the same hue merely for the sake of not clashing terribly with the default skin for the entire wiki (they're all rather bright colors with a specific saturation). What are your ideas?--Kodia 14:30, 10 August 2008 (UTC) ::I'm inclined to wait on discussing the colours for the top bands of boxes until we're discussing spiffing up the look of the whole site—for the sake of an integrated colour scheme. — Greer Watson 00:08, 11 August 2008 (UTC) :::When would you like to discuss it? Would you consider an instant message or skype conversation? I'm not sure when work will call me back (and I have a doctor's appointment today) but it might go a little faster if we were typing or talking in real time.--Kodia 11:36, 11 August 2008 (UTC) ::::Instant message is on a cell phone, isn't it? I don't have one. And I've no idea what "skype" is. (Which sort of anwers your question, I think.) ::::We need to know what sort of custom features it is possible for a sysop to do. As I said, I think that's in a section of Wikia that's only accessible to them, not ordinary users like me. ::::Also on the list to discuss needs to be the Main Page. At the very least it needs new pictures; but I think there are things that need updating in the sidebar (which people get on every page in the site), and maybe the text on the page as well. A lot of it is great. (I love having the quotation from the opening sequence!) But there's maybe other things to tweak. ::::I'm going to be really busy for the rest of today and tomorrow, since my mother's off to England for a few months. (My sister lives there.) This means a lot of frantic last minute stuff. After that would be better. — Greer Watson 23:36, 11 August 2008 (UTC) ::Wow. I didn't think the front page was that bad, but okay. Uhm...no, instant messaging happens on the computer, like a chat program. AOL instant messenger is a common one, Skype is another but Skype also allows voice chatting. If you're not familiar with either, we can do this in text, but I was trying to speed up the process. Chat when you're able. There's a chance I'm flying out of state starting early Friday morning so I'm not sure how busy I will be either.--Kodia 23:51, 11 August 2008 (UTC) Redirections I've just figured out how to make the Redirect function work—and promptly made a few. 1. First off, I've added a few more potential variants that people might use for Nick's name, specifically with the French spelling, Nicolas. 2. "If Looks Could Kill" is the most usual version of the name of the episode. In fact, the only one usually given. So I've (a) changed the name in the Episodename template, (b) made a note on the episode page of the alternative name; and © provided a Redirect page. 3. Most people spell Janette's last name as "DuCharme" (if they use it at all), i.e., with the surname as one word. It is, after all, a perfectly good French surname. So I've made a page in that spelling, copied the info over, and done "du Charme" as a redirect. 4. Again putting the most usual version as the main page, I've swapped "Don Schanke" as the main page and "Donald G. Schanke" as the redirect. After all, there is also a question of consistency: you do have "Nick Knight" as the main page, not "Nicholas Knight"! If you don't agree, we can obviously discuss it when you get back. Greer Watson 07:48, 31 July 2008 (UTC) :The redirects and changes you made are all fine. Please add what you will. Keep in mind, however, that redirection pages aren't counted in our total article count (not that this would matter to you or to me, but on some wiki, especially the other one that I run, it's very important).--Kodia 14:32, 10 August 2008 (UTC) ::I'm not sure I get the significance of this—unless the FK wiki has some maximum size alotted to it by Wikia. The point of redirects is to help the user, after all. Not us, since we (usually) know what to type in the Search box. If I think of a possible dead end, I do a redirect for it to minimize people's frustration. I think the term is "user friendly". (Idiot proof would be nice, but probably unattainable.) — Greer Watson 00:12, 11 August 2008 (UTC) Ultimately it's only significant if we make it significant. There's no max size. In fact, if we were to grow huge, we might even get some notoriety, but I'm guessing that won't be likely given the short run of the show. The point of the redirects is exactly as you state, but we we're counting page counts or article counts, the redirects don't get included. We might count articles to boast of our editing prowess. We might count them to rally the editing troupes. And we'd definitely count pages in order to brag on the Wikia entertainment hub. But does it truly matter? Likely no. And we can't make it idiot proof. But we *can* redirect to make it less idiot-*prone*. --Kodia 11:47, 11 August 2008 (UTC) Update: Another category added, plus more on episodes I figure I'd better add another update. Today, I went back to the episodes. The boxes have now been filled out for all the shows from Seasons 1, 2, and 3—except that some of them don't have pictures yet. I've also gone through IMDB and pulled the names of as many actors as possible, even when they only had bit parts, and maybe we don't even know who played what. I remember when I was writing my virtual season, one of the things I badly wanted to know was the number of actors involved in the shows: in a way, you can guesstimate the cost of an episode from the number of bit parts! In the interest of verisimilitude, I wanted to stick to a "budget" of sorts. You never know what someone will need to know. And this wiki is for all Forever Knight fans to browse and use. Yesterday, I added a new main category: Series Production. It is intended to include all the things that go into making the show. It has main subcategories for Actors, Directors, Sets, Locations, Special Effects—and eventually, no doubt, for Producers, Props,.... Some of the subcategories are distinct enough that I've also listed them directly under Category: Forever Knight. However, Sets and Locations are cross-categorized under Category:Places. After that, I dutifully did a whole bunch of pages for actors. They're all just stubs, of course. And they'll stay that way until someone else tackles them. Then, feeling very bored and virtuous, I had some fun doing a few Locations pages. A couple are just stubs, but Humber Nurseries and the Royal Ontario Museum both entertained me for a bit. I also started a page for The morgue. On my own website, I have pages touring you round several of the sets, so I'm going to cut them down a bit and put them here. When I have time. (Hah!) So far, none of the writers and directors have pages except for those of the actors who dabbled in other directions. I still need to do pages for Characters, too. And then, there's another major category I have in mind to sketch out. And that doesn't count fitting in some pictures on the Episodes pages: finishing off the top of every box with a screenshot (a few being missing); and doing the rest of the Guest Cast pictures; and adding in anything else I spot that should be useful.... Yes. More to do. Still. (How I spent the long weekend. Sigh.) Greer Watson 10:53, 5 August 2008 (UTC) :Okay this all looks good. Well done.--Kodia 14:50, 10 August 2008 (UTC) The Episodes pages Yesterday I finally finished...oh, well, just the boxes on the Episodes pages. Still, it feels like an achievement. Each box now has a picture at the top, and all the information filled out. I think maybe I should just indicate the principles by which I chose the pictures—though, considering the ones you picked, I think probably we're not so far apart. First, I picked only full screen captures. That means no cropped pictures. As a result, the pictures are not only the same width, but also the same height. Added to the fact that each box contains the same facts about their respective episodes, and this means that the boxes are almost all exactly the same size. (The "almost" results from the slight difference when there are two writers or directors, whose names appear on two lines. But, proportional to the size of the box, this difference is trivial.) Having the boxes the same size is a Good Idea: it creates a pleasing uniformity of layout, and presents a characteristic "look" to the Episodes section of the wiki. Second, I picked pictures that related directly to the episode itself in a characteristic way. That means no pretty portraits (of which there are a few, even uncropped), no romantic two-shots of the series regulars, and no biting shots where the face of the victim is obscured. Having said that, the picture could relate to the police plot, or the historical flashback, or be a personal scene, or some sort of characteristic scene-setting shot. For example, for Partners of the Month, I used a screen capture from the infamous breakfast scene where Schanke cooks bacon and eggs for poor Nick. Third, I picked an aesthetically pleasing picture. Aesthetics being subjective, this could mean anything (and often does!); but, in part at least, it means that I was looking for a screen capture in which the line and mass of the shapes seemed to balance. Interestingly, for some episodes there were several nice candidates. For others, it was hard to find anything. (Beyond the Law was especially hard.) I suspect that a lot has to do with the way the directors chose to set up the shots. As a rule, most screen captures don't qualify on the third count. Someone is half off screen, or there's a blurry bit. Or there's more blank/dark/background on one side of the picture than the other (which makes the shot a candidate for cropping). Or the picture just has people walking or standing variously around a room—but with no shape to their arrangement. As you can see, I'm a terrible fusspot. Anyway, you'll probably not care for all the pictures I chose. But at least it's done (done!!!) for now, and I can move on to something else. By the way, I have not done most of the little Guest Cast pictures. I'm going to leave those for later. Greer Watson 00:47, 7 August 2008 (UTC) :At the very least, there are pictures where there were none. I think you've chosen well. I was going through the same trouble, but, as I mentioned, I was working on projects that took less time and could actually be completed in a short time frame. You've worked hard on this and it shows. Thankyou.--Kodia 15:11, 10 August 2008 (UTC) Today's update Although what I really wanted to do was start porting over the Character pages I did on Fan History (or else start a little section I have in mind on Story Structure), I've spent the evening doing something else entirely: the material on Fan Activities from FH. So that's another major category. It subsumes conventions, websites, mailing lists, awards, and...well, basically, any type of fan related activity. Many of these are important enough to be listed directly under the main Forever Knight category head; and a lot of them are cross-categorized elsewhere. But it's a question of identifying possible nodes of inquiry—directions that some other fan might take in exploring the site. I can well imagine someone who is fan oriented (rather than series oriented) looking at the material from a very different perspective from the one that I personally would use. Again, a question of maximum usefulness to the most people. Occasionally the cross-categorization gets intriguing. The Virtual Fourth Season, for example, is a subcategory of Fan Activities—as it was a collective activity. But so is Fan Fiction a section of Fan Activities, of course. And V4S is in that, too. But way, way down, merely as a subcategory of Virtual Seasons, which is a subcategory of Fan Fiction by Genre. One might not find it there; and likely not recognize its importance as a group activity. So it needs to go in both places. I have ported over so many little pages, most of them no more than stubs. I drew the line at the pages for individual fanzines. I've asked Susan to do them. Aside from that, I'm feeling incredibly virtuous right now. Greer Watson 07:50, 7 August 2008 (UTC) :I think you did great. Do you think Susan will take up the fanzine mantle? Is there anything you'd like to see put in place for her work if she does?--Kodia 15:17, 10 August 2008 (UTC) ::Well, she e-mailed me back to say that she would do the fanzines, but wasn't sure when she'd actually get around to it. (RL being as helpful as it usually is.) ::I'm not sure what your other question means. I assume she'll be free to list her work on her author page, and do the titles individually if she wants, as well. She was doing a fair lot on FH. I think the situation that developed may have been a bit dispiriting, given her hopes; so if RL has intervened, she may just have let it. But, if she does the fanzines, it may get her to muck in with us and whip this wiki into shape! ::I'd like us eventually to be able to go to FORNI-L and announce (or re-announce) it, and ask for help. But not until there's something—quite a lot of something—for people to browse around. We should hold off on the asking for help for a week after the announcement (tell them it's coming, but not yet) so that they can simply enjoy looking. And then, when we do ask, it should be relatively specific. ::I envision an "Adoptathon" approach. Although people will, of course, be told that they are free to edit wherever they see a need, we could maybe ask people to volunteer themselves to adopt a page. Suggest for "Adoptathon #1" that they pick an episode and add something: a better summary, a few quotations. Then for "Adoptathon #2", maybe ask faction members to tackle those pages. Ask GWD fans to fill out his page, and the same for the other main actors. That sort of thing. ::Anyway, that's for later. I don't think we've got to that stage quite yet. — Greer Watson 06:01, 11 August 2008 (UTC) Of course Susan would be free to edit as she desired. I just wanted to be sure there wasn't anything we could put into place to help her along before she returned from RL. I couldn't speak to her disappointment at the other site, but I'm hopeful that Wikia's stability will be a boon to her spirits. As for FORKNI-L announcements, I made one when I first re-joined the list (I was on it when the list was first started oh so many years ago, but left when I left university). The sound of the crickets in response was deafening. Another announcement would be fine but I'm itching to tell people sooner rather than later, personally. As for the "Adoptathon" idea, we do something similar over at the other (BIG) wiki I manage. We don't call it that, but it amounts to the same thing and seems to work quite well. We can certainly wait on this too.--Kodia 11:53, 11 August 2008 (UTC) :I think we should wait until we've done at least the following. First, put in place all the main categories and pages we envision. They won't all be filled out; in fact a lot will be mere stubs. And there'll always be room for people to put in more! But I think it will help reduce confusion if we have the shape of the site laid out. And you mentioned earlier having our intentions clear for other users: oh, yes!! :Second, we should wait until we've redone the Main Page. That's the first thing people will see, and it needs to be both nice to look at and easy to use for getting places. — Greer Watson 23:44, 11 August 2008 (UTC) Screenwriters I've just finished making pages for all of the screenwriters who worked on Forever Knight. They're only stubs, of course. There's no biographical data, or anything like that. However, each page lists all the episodes the writer worked on. As a result, I'm feeling dreadfully virtuous again. These various batches of stubs have to be done, but they're very boring. I still have the directors and producers to do, too. — Greer Watson 05:35, 11 August 2008 (UTC) :Better some information than no information, I'd say.--Kodia 11:54, 11 August 2008 (UTC)